Six Ways To Not Look Like A Writing Newbie (Even If You Are One)

Here are a few helpful hints on how to submit to magazines without appearing clueless.

1. Format your manuscript. There are numerous places to find information for standard manuscript format. Many magazines have links on their sites for such standards. Writing single-spaced in Times New Roman is fine, but if you don’t reformat the story before you submit, it won’t set well with most editors.

2. Know the market. Don’t submit your 7,000 word story to a magazine that only accepts works between 1,000 and 5,000 words, and don’t submit fantasy to a romance magazine. If a story doesn’t fit the magazine’s guidelines, you’ll loudly proclaim, “I have no clue what you publish, but here’s something I wrote anyway.”

3. Address the editor. In your cover letter (and mailing address), use the editor’s name. Omitting this (or even worse, using the wrong name) will show a lack of research on your part.

4. Write a proper cover letter. There are numerous web articles on this as well as examples within writing reference books. Essentially, you’ll want to be brief, covering at least the title of the story, word count, genre and writing credentials. Even if you have no writing credentials, you won’t smell like a newbie unless your letter is strange. Examples of strangeness include: comments about how wonderful your story is, comments about what others think of your story, comments about what the editor should think about your story, comments about how you wrote the story, comments completely unrelated to the story, suicide threats, death threats, blood stains, teeth marks or hieroglyphics.

5. Use proper packaging. If you’re sending a story in the mail, don’t cram ten pages into a greeting card envelope. Use a flat envelope so that you’re not folding the pages. In a stack of slush, you want your story to stand apart, not the package you mailed it in.

6. Don’t send a follow-up query too quickly. If a market clearly takes 90 days to process submissions, don’t send an email two weeks after submitting. You don’t want to reveal yourself as an irritating person before the story gets read. At least wait until you’re working with an editor on rewrites to show your true colors.

Submission Follow-ups

After we submit a manuscript to a magazine, we wait for a response. That duration varies depending on the market, among other factors, and we should follow-up with the editor of that publication if there hasn’t been a response in a reasonable amount of time.

What’s a reasonable wait? We can find reported response times for established markets through websites like Duotrope and The Black Hole. Some magazines also post slush updates or statistics on their websites. Newer magazines tend to be fairly quick at first because they don’t have a backlog of submissions to sift through (unless they opened to a private group of authors first).

Once you’ve calculated the average response time over the past few months, add that time to your submission to figure out a due date. (For example, if you submitted on June 1 and calculate an average response time of three months, expect a response on September 1.) When you reach the due date, check Duotrope and The Black Hole again to see if other authors have posted submission updates. If the magazine responded to authors who submitted after you, that should be a yellow flag. If not, you may need to adjust your due date based on the latest statistics.

My due date is here, so I’m ripping the editor in half! Don’t be so hasty. Check the magazine’s website to see if they have any news about their slush pile. Also, look at the submission guidelines. They may specify that you not contact them about unanswered submissions until a certain time period has passed, one that is likely past your due date. (Look for taglines such as: “Do not send a follow-up query until after 90 days.”)

If all sources, from the tracking sites to the magazine’s site, indicate that you should have received a response by now, be kind in your follow-up. Letters get lost in the mail, spam-guards kill emails, and editors get side-tracked. In any case, assume this was not malicious on the part of the editor. Just send a quick note or email stating the date of your submission, the title of your story, and ask if they received the submission.

Hopefully the editor will respond within a few days, and I usually like to allow for at least a month for a response. If you don’t receive a response to your follow-up, you may want to send an additional follow-up or choose another market for your work. Don’t waste a year waiting for a response from a market that typically replies within three months. Something happened. Move on.

Queries Away!

I queried seven agents, and I’ve already received back my first rejection (no comments – possibly a form response). I might send one more query out next week, and then I’m going to wait for a while. I want to see what kinds of responses (if any) I receive from these first few queries. It takes me a lot of time to prepare each query, and I’d rather not prepare all twenty queries at once. I think I’d like to keep the number of open queries below ten. So far, here are my stats:

20 agents selected
7 queries submitted (6 electronic, 1 postal)
1 rejection received
Average response time: 1 day

Stay tuned for more updates as I have them.

When to Pull the Plug

Retreat never sets well with me. Perhaps others are more realistic with their works, but I find it difficult to reevaluate a short story and deem it as unfit for further submissions. I keep thinking, “Perhaps this story will do better with the next market. I just need to give it another chance.”

My main argument for an annual reevaluation of stories is to promote the highest level of quality in submissions. If you’ve read and applied my entry on getting organized, then time isn’t much of a factor with submissions. Also, if you’re targeting markets that allow electronic submissions, then money isn’t much of a factor either. But what kinds of stories are you pushing forward with your name attached to them? If these are stories written three years ago, they will not show your current skill level (assuming you are improving). You want editors to read your writing at its best, not at its former best.

I’ve often fallen into the trap of saying, “Look! I have X stories in submissions.” Is that really an impressive statement? Regardless of what X is, it isn’t the same as saying, “I sold X stories this year.” I would rather have only two stories in submission if I knew that they were both of great quality than have a mixed batch of twelve stories. After a while, it just becomes a distraction, no matter how much you’ve planned out your submissions ahead of time.

I know it’s hard to put a story in a drawer knowing it won’t come out again, but that story did advance your skill level by some measure. It was a valuable use of your time, and the next story will be that much better. Learn from whatever mistakes you made with the old story, and move on.

Get Organized

Submitting to markets can become rather tedious. I’ve found that the time I spend in finding markets and preparing submissions is time taken from writing. I have a few tips for minimizing the amount of time spent with this particular business end of writing.

Use a template for cover letters. A template is like a cookie cutter so that all copies look similar and uniform. Fill in the parts that won’t change (like author’s bio, your address and signature line). Then leave space for the recipient’s address, greeting line and verbiage specific to the work or the person you’re submitting to. Now, whenever you need to submit your query letter, start with the template and fill in the gaps.

With each work you complete, take a moment (the sooner the better) to write a simple synopsis of the story (for short stories, this should be only a few sentences). It should read like the back of a book, spurring interest in the story. Eventually, you will plug this into your template when submitting to markets.

Now that your work is complete and you know the word count, find all the markets that match up (fantasy writers, check out this article: finding a fantasy market). Make an ordered list of the markets you want to submit your work to. If you’ve already found and prioritized markets ahead of time, you won’t need to periodically repeat the same search. I advise keeping a link to each magazine in the list so that you can quickly lookup the address and confirm that they are still in existence and accepting submissions.

Another time saver for me is to purchase large envelopes ahead of time from the post office (my personal choice is the more expensive type used for photos because it doesn’t bend easily). Then all I need to do is print the story and cover letter. At the post office I go to, there’s even a machine set up that will calculate the correct postage and sell the appropriate stamp, keeping me free of any frustratingly long lines (unless I need more high quality envelopes).

By using these tips, you should be able to flip stories from one market to the next efficiently and painlessly. The amount of time needed to apply changes to the template, print and go should be hardly noticeable. It just takes a little organization up front.

Finding a Fantasy Market

As someone who has submitted to wrong markets in the past, I wish to help those who are willing to find the right market for their work. I’m focusing on the fantasy genre because that’s what I write, and it’s the market that I know the most about. Specific markets will not be mentioned since the market is constantly changing.
I was a big proponent of using the Writer’s Market books. To this day, I agree that they convey a lot of helpful information, but there are free methods of locating fantasy markets that work just as well. If you have the money available to buy the book (or ask for it as a gift), it will prove useful. It just isn’t essential.

One of my favorite finds on the Internet is Ralan. Ralan’s list of Speculative fiction and humor markets remains current, relying upon updates from the writing community. The markets are broken into various categories, such as book publishers, semi and pro markets, paying markets and just for the love markets. Each market comes with a description and information about its state of affairs (backlogged and slow or temporarily closed, for example). Before submitting anything to a magazine, I’ll check Ralan because sometimes not even a magazine’s own website will list any problems or changes, but the writing community found out and informed Ralan.

Another recent discovery for me was Duotrope. This allows users to query the various markets of a wide number of genres. Queries take shape with a number of parameters, including pay scale, length, media type and submission type. Duotrope also has a database on response times from the various markets and acceptance/rejection ratios (similar to another good response time site called The Black Hole). Duotrope is another website dependent upon information from the writing community.

Finally, information comes from writers themselves. Whether you’re reading the information from a blog, newsgroup, chat room or personal web site, up to date news comes from those who have already hunted for it. Why rediscover something that someone else already found?

We’re writers, so our time should be spent writing, not searching endlessly for markets. The key information is out there. You just have to know where to look. If you know of some other data-rich sites for finding markets, add a post to inform others of your grand discovery. I’d be excited to find out about it!

Common Mistakes

After learning many writing mistakes the hard way, I thought I should make some notes for the benefit of those that want to avoid similar pains. This is not about writing technique; it is about selecting a market for a finished work and then submitting to that market properly. By no means is this an exhaustive list of my mistakes, so I will likely share others in future posts.

Mistake #1 – Failing to properly prepare a submission. There are standard rules for submitting fiction. For short stories, there’s a query letter, the story itself and a Self Addressed Stamped Envelope (SASE). For novels, there’s usually just a query letter until the publisher or agent asks for more. Each market may have subtle differences, and in missing those differences, you have demonstrated your ignorance about whom you’re submitting to and stand little chance of having your material read.

Mistake #2 – Assuming you know more than you do. I always thought the most professional-looking font for story submissions was Times New Roman. Later, I discovered that it’s better to use Courier because it makes it easier to look at the length and is more of an editing standard. It may be a small thing to use Courier font, but it is yet another identifier of your level of professionalism and may be the difference in how much of your submission is read by the editor. Don’t make any assumptions about your submissions. Buy a book (like Writer’s Market) and check websites for suggestions.

Mistake #3 – Paying for confirmation with a submission. This means that whoever receives your submission cannot simply pick it up from the post office box or mailbox. Instead, someone must sign a receipt that it was received. While doing this confirms that your submission reached its intended destination, it marks your submission as more trouble than it’s worth and labels you as insecure and paranoid. I did this in the past before I learned from multiple sources that it’s a really bad idea. Now, if I haven’t heard anything on a submission for a number of months, I send follow-up letters. In the few times that I’ve sent follow-ups, I’ve received responses within a week or two indicating reasons why I haven’t received my SASE back.

Mistake #4 – Submitting to the wrong market. I never properly researched the magazines I submitted to at first. Even if your writing style is superb, not all magazines are the right place for your story, and not all publishers are right for your novel. It takes time to research the markets, but when you send something to the wrong place, you’re wasting time because instead of sending the story to places where they actually publish similar narratives, you’re waiting months to hear back from someone that never would have published your story regardless of how well it was written.

Mistake #5 – Asking to have your manuscript returned. I don’t know that this makes any difference in how you are perceived by the publisher or editor, but it’s a waste of money. In order to have a manuscript returned, you must purchase an envelope large enough to contain it and pay for the extra postage. Once it comes back, it’s highly unlikely you will be able to submit that same manuscript to a new market because it has lost its pristine quality in which you sent it originally (in fact, I once had a manuscript returned with a shoeprint on it). My reason for asking for manuscripts to be returned was out of the fear that someone would steal my work. This is, of course, an irrational fear because as soon as anything is printed on paper, even to go into submission, it has an inherent copyright.

The five mistakes listed are common pitfalls to many new writers. If you are committing any of them, rather than panic, simply adjust what you’re doing for future submissions. It’s never too late to change as long as you’re drawing breath. Slap your forehead, and move on.

Perseverance

I enjoyed writing at an early age, but it wasn’t until after college that I decided to try to do something more with it. Armed with a poorly written novel and a handful of mediocre short stories, I went forth to stake my claim among those who had been published ahead of me. What I didn’t understand at the time was just how difficult it could be to become published. My delusions of bypassing the years of waiting I’d heard rumors of extended even to the point of submitting a sample of my novel straight to TOR.

Soon the form rejection letters followed, and my hopes of a quick entry into the writing world were crushed. I wavered on the option of vanity publishing, but once I understood the lack of credibility in such efforts, I abandoned that route. By the end of my first year of submitting to markets, I felt bruised and less sure of myself than at the onset of my adventure.

I abandoned the thought of finding an agent or book publisher for my novel in order to focus on writing short stories. I hoped to find publication in some of the smaller literary magazines and then work my way up from there. One obvious problem was that I wasn’t writing literary fiction. I didn’t understand how poor my selections for magazines were until I paid to enter a contest with one of them. Once I received the issue with the winners and runners-up, I understood that literary magazines weren’t as open to genre fiction as I first imagined.

My stories soon began to change as I abandoned borderline speculative fiction in favor of unapologetic fantasy. I took the world from my shabby novel and changed it, adding a more rigid foundation and expanding this relatively unknown setting into something tangible. The older short stories dropped off my radar, and I stopped submitting them.

After a few years, I had regular time each week devoted to writing. More stories came and went, but through all of this, I was growing in my writing skills. Styles I had been afraid to try became regular as I threw caution to the wind and kept charging forward. I was growing, but still I had no publications to show for all my efforts.

It wasn’t until a submission to The Sword Review that I had a promising rejection: one that asked if I had more of what I had submitted because the story ended too quickly. I soon completed an additional two stories to accompany the one that had been rejected and resubmitted. After a short time, I was overjoyed to find that they wanted to purchase all three.

It had been over six years since I started submitting stories until my success with The Sword Review. I don’t know what the average time to publication is for a new writer, but the wait is worth it. To those who are still struggling with selling that first story, it certainly won’t happen by giving up, so keep going.